Free Madoff with the Money by Jerry Oppenheimer Page A

picture, she says, “Oh, my God, there’s Bernie Madoff. He’s the hottest broker. So and so invested a lot of money with him! They’ve been with him for years. He doesn’t take all accounts. Bernie’s like the guru of investing.”
    That’s how they portrayed him.
    A week later Bernie was arrested.
    Shelley Fogel jokingly asserts that Bernie “started his own Social Security. Social Security is like a Ponzi scheme,” he maintains. “The last ones in pay for the first guys that were in. That’s what Bernie did.”
    After the Madoff scandal broke, Fogel was offered $250 for his Far Rockaway yearbook that had a photo of the internationally infamous fraudster along with his autograph. Bernie had simply written: “To Fogue, Lots of luck in college, Bernie.”
    In September 1956, Bernie, too, was about to begin his own college career, in the segregated Deep South of all places.

Chapter 4
    From Queens to Alabama, Scamming Homeowners and Hustling Stock
    When 18-year-old Bernie Madoff arrived at the University of Alabama, on the banks of the Black Warrior River in Tuscaloosa, in September 1956, the school was embroiled in racial ferment.
    While the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in 1954 against segregated schools in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, Bernie’s college of choice was still all-white—and would stridently remain so for some years to come.
    Just seven months before his arrival, a 26-year-old black woman by the name of Autherine Juanita Lucy, who had earned a bachelor of arts degree in English at an all-black college in Alabama, was reluctantly accepted by the University of Alabama administration, and with racist hostility from students and the community.
    A number of court cases eventually upheld by the Supreme Court, and with the support of civil rights attorney and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, along with activism by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), resulted in Lucy being admitted on February 3, 1956, as a graduate student in library science. She was “the first Negro” ever permitted to attend a white public school or university in Alabama’s long and scandalous history of segregation and racial violence. Though allowed in classrooms, she was barred from dining halls and dormitories; the hope was she would quickly drop out.
    But three days into her matriculation, an angry, stick-wielding, confederate flag-waving mob of students and outsiders riled up by the Ku Klux Klan and other hatemongers blocked her from attending classes. A news photograph of the riot scene showed university students standing around a bonfire burning desegregation literature.
    If Bernie, who had announced his plan to attend the University of Alabama in his Far Rockaway yearbook, had read the February 7 front page of the New York Times —doubtful since he wasn’t a reader and cared little about current events—he would have seen the two-column, above-the-fold headline that read: “Negro Co-ed Is Suspended to Curb Alabama Clashes.”
    According to the report, she was spirited off the campus and Tuscaloosa policemen had to fire tear gas to break up “a midnight anti-Negro demonstration.” At one point demonstrators had been “pelting eggs on an elderly Negro” who had driven Autherine Lucy to the campus from Birmingham, the Times reported. University officials said she was suspended “for her own safety.”
    That was the bigoted and rabble-rousing atmosphere that permeated the campus when Bernie arrived in Alabama in the fall of 1956.
    The issues of racism and segregation were not of concern to Bernie—Laurelton and Far Rockaway High School had few, if any, blacks, and blacks were sequestered in ghetto neighborhoods in the New York boroughs and on Long Island. Segregation was simply an accepted way of life to him, de facto as it was up North. Bernie was no